OneTeam Progress Update May 2026

Key updates

OneTeam v. 1.0 is live and in the hands of beta users. While we still have a long feature list to tackle and plenty to figure out, early customers’ 'aha' moments strongly validate our potential and confirm just how much pain hiring is in high turnover industries.

How v. 1.0 works today:

1. Managers distribute the OneTeam-generated job post.
2. Candidates apply via a conversation with the OneTeam agent.
3. OneTeam automatically handles screening, ranking, and scheduling.
4. Top applicants appear directly on managers’ calendars, eliminating manual screening and scheduling.

Our long-term vision remains unchanged: a manager signals a need to hire, and OneTeam handles every step of the process until a perfect employee walks in for their first shift.

Product update

People don’t buy technology. They buy what it does for them. And since OneTeam’s vision is not to make hiring software slightly better, but rather to rethink what hiring even looks like in a world where AI exists, we’ve been focusing on building a system that behaves less like a tool and more like a capable hiring teammate.

Over the past period, much of our product work has centered around reducing operational friction for managers while increasing momentum throughout the hiring process. Instead of requiring managers to manually coordinate every step, we’ve been shaping workflows where AI actively moves hiring forward: publishing jobs, sourcing candidates, screening applicants, highlighting the strongest matches, coordinating interviews, handling reminders and reschedules, and maintaining progress until a role is filled.

A major area of focus has also been clarity and trust. We’ve continued refining how AI communicates with managers and candidates — from interview scheduling and availability handling to multilingual conversations, notifications, and candidate status visibility — ensuring the experience feels reliable, proactive, and easy to follow. This includes making recommendations more transparent, reducing unnecessary notifications, and surfacing only the most relevant actions and candidates at the right moments.

At the same time, we’ve been evolving the hiring experience from the candidate side. We introduced clearer job publishing flows, candidate-facing job pages, and recruitment sharing mechanisms such as direct links and QR posters, allowing businesses to promote openings wherever they already attract talent while keeping applications centralized within OneTeam.

Underneath these workflows, we’ve continued investing in the matching and intelligence layer of the platform. Our focus remains on quality over quantity: identifying candidates that are genuinely strong fits based not only on experience, but also signals like availability, proximity, and long-term fit potential. The goal is not simply to process applicants faster, but to help restaurants consistently make better hires with less effort.

Across all of this work, our guiding principle remains the same: hiring should not feel like managing software. It should feel like having a highly capable teammate that keeps the process moving, surfaces good judgment at the right moments, and allows managers to focus their attention where it matters most.

AI tech findings and experience

We’ve come a long way since we started and it definitely feels like we’re through many cycles already. Building software definitely evolved and so are our workflows. We experimented a lot with different AI coding tools and we’ve built our own - in many ways it feels like we’re building two products in parallel, OneTeam as a frontman, but also a OneTeam Admin Panel as a band itself.  

Admin panel: turning usage into intuition

The admin panel has become our window into how OneTeam actually performs in the wild — org and location-level health, operational signals, and a live view of the candidate experience as it's happening. That last one means we often catch bugs before a user reports them.

It also has its own AI agent. Anyone on the team can ask it for a metric or query, save the result, and share it with the team. We've gone from "I wonder if…" to a table on the wall in minutes — reshaping both how we analyze the product and how we debug it. We are aiming to empower it with chart generation and dynamic metrics in the next couple of iterations.

Other learning and technical improvements

Parallel agent development. We restructured our workflow around isolated git worktrees so multiple AI agents can build features side-by-side without stepping on each other. Work that used to be sequential is now genuinely parallel — we ship more PRs, with fewer merge conflicts.

OT Sensei, our in-house domain expert. We built a Slack bot wired into our codebase and GitHub issues. The team asks it questions, has it help debug, and even gets it to draft tickets. It’s currently being adopted and it still has rough edges (for example it speaks “too technical”) but it’s on a way to reduce back-and-forth questions exchanged between teams. Just to name a few examples: it can accurately tell you when we send notifications about upcoming interviews, what kind of notifications we actually send, what is the logic behind “strong fit” etc.

AI helps, humans decide. Not every lesson was a win. We learned to keep certain steps — like database migrations — under explicit human review, even when AI could automate them. Speed matters, but the bar for irreversible changes is higher. That discipline is even more important to us today as we are out of silo and we have real customers using the product now.

GTM strategy

1. The Watcher
   
   1. We are currently developing our proprietary, in-house GTM (Go-To-Market) agent designed specifically to scale our SMB customer acquisition.

2. Product-led growth
   
   1. For an SMB product-led growth tool, optimizing for SEO, AEO, and GEO is essential for organic visibility, despite the evolving, opaque nature of search algorithms. The company is actively building its content foundation and strengthening its digital presence (www.oneteam.is/blog).

3. Partnerships & Ecosystem
   
   1. While conversations are early and no deals yet, we are exploring several avenues around distribution partnerships.

Other

We did our first OneTeam work week in Venice last week, which was great fun and also very productive. It is vital for a remote team to spend time together, so we hope to continue doing those trips in the future.

We also attended the NRA (National Restaurant Association) show in Chicago this weekend for possible customer and partner connections, which was great. It is impressive to see how the tech side of the restaurant industry is evolving every year. Our first year at the NRA was in 2015 with Sling, and since then the tech section has grown significantly.

Thank you for reading, and for being supportive of OneTeam.

The best is yet to come!

With gratitude,

The team at OneTeam